It could have been exhaustion etched into the face of Marshall Island climate envoy Tina Stege, as she spoke with media halfway through day nine of the United Nations climate talks.

It could just as easily have been fear.

The Marshall Islands is an unlikely powerhouse at the COP for its role in founding a grouping called the High Ambition Coalition, a voting bloc of nations that appeared suddenly and dramatically at the Paris climate talks.

The Marshall Islands elder statesman Tony DeBrum, who has since died, managed to craft a coalition that spanned the globe, including small climate-vulnerable nations, then much of Europe and eventually the United States.

The HAC, as its known, is responsible for altering the language of the Paris Agreement to make its goal to hold global warming to “well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels”.

DeBrum began to build the coalition when it became clear to him that above 1.5 degrees, his nation would cease to exist. Today, says Wesley Morgan, a Pacific specialist with the Climate Council, the coalition carries not only moral authority but political heft as a bloc that unites developed and developing nations which have traditionally not acted in concert.

It is working to make the 1.5 degree goal it forced into the Paris Accord the Glasgow document’s central focus, with the support of the current COP presidency which has made “keep 1.5 alive” a slogan of the talks, echoing DeBrum’s own “1.5 to stay alive”.

Stege took to a press conference stage on Tuesday to address a new assessment by Climate Action Tracker that given all the commitments so far made at COP26, the world remains on track for between 2.4 degrees, if governments deliver on their promises, and 2.7 if they continue with their current policies.